Franklin-Willis has a fine touch for the small-town Southern world in which she grew up and an obvious affection for her...
In Franklin-Willis’ first novel, set in 1985 with backward glances at three decades, a 40-something Southerner struggles to come to grips with his roles as father, son, ex-husband and twin brother.
Ezekiel Cooper was supposed to be the one in his family to make it out of their small working-class community. His mother Lillian, whose own ambitions were thwarted by her first pregnancy, had low expectations for her three daughters, and Ezekiel’s brother Carter was mentally impaired since a childhood bout of encephalitis, but Lillian recognized Ezekiel’s potential and made sure he received a scholarship to the University of Virginia. Twenty years later, Ezekiel works at the elevator plant and lives alone with his dog in a shack in Lillian’s backyard. Divorced from his high-school sweetheart, who has recently remarried, he rarely sees his daughters. And he’s still grief-stricken over Carter’s drowning 10 years earlier. He blames Lillian for Carter’s brief, unhappy life but blames himself for Carter’s accidental death. In a depressed funk, he drives out of town planning to commit suicide. Instead he finds himself heading to the horse-country farm outside Charlottesville, where he lived with Lillian’s cousin Georgia and her wealthy husband Osborne during the happy months he attended college in 1960, before returning home for Christmas. Discovering his mother had placed Carter in a facility, he quit school to take charge of Carter’s care. Now he finds happiness in Virginia again, not to mention potential romance. But then he learns his mother is dying and his older daughter is in emotional crisis, along with his ex-wife. His efforts to balance his own needs with his responsibility to his family are set in relief against Lillian’s memories of being a wife and mother torn between love of family and private yearnings.
Franklin-Willis has a fine touch for the small-town Southern world in which she grew up and an obvious affection for her characters, if anything a surfeit of affection—Ezekiel’s sensitivity strains credibility and wears the reader out.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2005-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Dec. 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2011
A tour de force.
In 1974, a troubled Vietnam vet inherits a house from a fallen comrade and moves his family to Alaska.
After years as a prisoner of war, Ernt Allbright returned home to his wife, Cora, and daughter, Leni, a violent, difficult, restless man. The family moved so frequently that 13-year-old Leni went to five schools in four years. But when they move to Alaska, still very wild and sparsely populated, Ernt finds a landscape as raw as he is. As Leni soon realizes, “Everyone up here had two stories: the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you.” There are many great things about this book—one of them is its constant stream of memorably formulated insights about Alaska. Another key example is delivered by Large Marge, a former prosecutor in Washington, D.C., who now runs the general store for the community of around 30 brave souls who live in Kaneq year-round. As she cautions the Allbrights, “Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next. There’s a saying: Up here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you.” Hannah’s (The Nightingale, 2015, etc.) follow-up to her series of blockbuster bestsellers will thrill her fans with its combination of Greek tragedy, Romeo and Juliet–like coming-of-age story, and domestic potboiler. She re-creates in magical detail the lives of Alaska's homesteaders in both of the state's seasons (they really only have two) and is just as specific and authentic in her depiction of the spiritual wounds of post-Vietnam America.
A tour de force.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-312-57723-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
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